Future challenges of irsimple protocol: Efficient flow control scheme and long distance capability

IrSimple protocol, recently proposed by the Infrared Data Association (IrDA), promises a simple Infrared protocol for fast, wireless communication between mobile devices and digital home appliances. The existing flow control scheme adopted by IrSimple protocol consumes a considerable amount of energy and resources by retransmitting large sized Information frame in case the receiving secondary station remains busy due to handling other tasks and therefore can not send the acknowledgement of received frames. In our previous work, we proposed an efficient flow control scheme which effectively reduces the redundant data retransmissions by using Receiver Ready (RR) supervisory frames and assumed all the frames are received error free during flow control procedure. In this paper, we examine in detail all possible cases where Information frames or Supervisory frames may be lost at different stages of flow control to investigate the effectiveness of our proposed flow control scheme. Furthermore, we investigate the long distance capability of current IrDA links which is another future challenge to enhance IrSimple protocol applications.